A Year in Reading: Allegra Goodman

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My favorite book this year was Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. This is one of those books I carried around with me all the time in hopes I’d have a few minutes to keep reading. I don’t usually read historical novels, but this one was so luscious and unsentimental that I could not put it down. It’s the story of the Anne Boleyn crisis from a fresh point of view: that of Thomas Cromwell, lawyer and fixer for Henry VIII. I love Mantel’s intimate point of view, and her unsparing portrait of Cromwell, who is a pragmatist, to say the least. He’s a ruthless politico and yet you feel for him as well. Mantel couldn’t fit everything into this book, so she’s writing a sequel. I can’t wait!

I’ve spent the past year rereading books I was assigned in high school English, a project that had two consequences. 1) Every great book I heard about this year that I did not read in high school went into a future-read pile that now resembles a sleeping baby rhino in the corner of my bedroom and 2) this year’s reading felt like being ages 16 and 39 at the same time. Which meant I remembered not liking a lot of novels because I had to read/quote from/essay upon them but saw them in the entirely new light of 20 of almost-middle-age adulthood.

Let us ignore that I was that idiot in 10th grade who wore a red earflap hat and trenchcoat for a few weeks because Holden Caufield “understood me” and move to this: How many siblings does Mr. Caufield have? We all remember younger sister Phoebe and probably older brother DB, the one working as a screenwriter out west. But do you remember Holden’s younger brother Allie, who has died recently when the novel opens? In a pivotal scene — the one right before he meets Phoebe at the Natural History Museum — he is wandering Park Avenue, lonesome and heartbroken, and each block reciting “Please Allie, don’t let me die.”

I missed Allie the first 10 times I read Catcher and focused on what everyone else did: That Holden Caufield is a brat, perhaps the ur-pain-in-the-ass-surly teenager to bond with or recoil from. But that stereotype didn’t really exist in the mid 1940s when Salinger conceived of him while enlisted as a soldier, a young man just a bit older than Holden when we witnessed handfuls of his friends die in battle. Holden helped birth the surly-teen generation (he arrived a good few years before rock n’ roll, the panic over juvenile delinquency and Rebel Without a Cause) but came from the one before, who knew the refrain of “please don’t let me die” from Normandy and Dunkirk.

Holden Caulfield may “understand us” when we are lonely, heartbroken teenagers too. He may also seem too embarrassing or stuck in time to revisit as adults. But I was a bit older this round, had some context and the ghost of a dead brother whispering through the pages like a sigh heard in the dark. I may now just think Holden is a kid who is lost in grief. And chances are as we all are a little bit older, we’ve been there too and understand.

It was also over the summer that I looked around my apartment and realized that I own far too many books I’ve never read and keep accumulating more. I spent the next few months trying to read through all the books stacked around and under and over all my furniture.

What do a ruthless California ad exec and a Jewish mail order bride have in common? Almost nothing. The two best books I read in 2011 — both debut novels published this year — couldn’t be more different, except for the stunningly good writing inside them.

Charles McLeod’s satirical novel American Weather is so raucous, so original, and so stridently anti-consumerism, that it hasn’t yet found a U.S. publisher. The ironies are many. This aptly titled novel captures our country’s zeitgeist with such precision that it could and should be the handbook for Occupy Wall Street. Luckily Random House UK was smart enough to snatch it up. The novel follows Jim Haskin, a middle-aged millionaire who stages the publicity stunt to end publicity stunts: he sells ad space to American corporations on the body of a death-row inmate, who has the companies’ logos tattooed on every inch of his skin. The kicker: the prisoner’s death is broadcast on national television.

What makes this outrageous story readable is the scorching humor McLeod brings to it. He’s laughing at us, with us, all over us. What’s more surprising, though, is the depth of feeling in the book — a mesmerizing kind of melancholy. Haskin may be a first-class despot, but he has a wife in a coma and a teenage son slipping away from him. In letters sent to his father from boarding school, his son is everything Haskin isn’t: sensitive, likeable, profoundly wise. I read this book in airports and on airplanes, and as I splattered the pages with laughter-spit and tears, I felt the uncrossable space between father and son and between the American dream and what we’ve got instead.

This is the time to be grateful for a certain multinational online bookstore — oh, the ironies — pretty much the only place Americans can find this book (through the UK web address, that is). (And yes, an e-book is available!)

Anna Solomon’s historical novel The Little Bride is equally unflinching, but the world it brings to life is one unfamiliar to most of us. Inspired by the real-life movement Am Olam, which sent Jewish immigrants to the frontier to forge communities in the wilderness, the novel is about Minna Losk, a 16-year-old orphan from Odessa who travels to South Dakota in the 1880s to marry a man she’s never met. To her dismay, he turns out to be a 40-year-old Orthodox widower named Max, who is as poor a farmer as he is a husband. Compounding Minna’s utter lack of feeling for Max are her growing feelings for his 18-year-old son, with whom she develops a super-sexy, passive-aggressive pseudo-romance that alone makes the book worth reading.

What stays with me long after finishing The Little Bride, though, are the artful, utterly convincing details of life on the Plains — the paper Minna helplessly pastes to the mud walls of her new house, a rope tied to the family cow to find her way through a snowstorm. This new life is unimaginably austere, and the combination of disappointment and determination with which Minna faces it makes her one of the most memorable protagonists I’ve come across.

Both of these books are about pretty bleak landscapes, yet sentence by sentence, both writers manage to make them feel full and warm and bright. McLeod’s prose is breathless and buoyant, Solomon’s sharp and sleek. Both make me want to sit down at the keyboard and make sentences of my own.

Two of the best books from recent years that I got around to reading in 2009 were The Life You Save May Be Your Own by Paul Elie and The Master by Colm Tóibín. Elie’s book, a group portrait of four Catholic American writers at mid-century (Flannery O’Connor, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, and Walker Percy) is old-fashioned in the best ways. It unfolds slowly, but its insights are deep, unshowy, and finally poignant. By the time its subjects reach the ends of their lives, you feel you know, as well as one can, their souls. Tóibín’s fictional account of the life of Henry James is similar in the cumulative power of its effects, and it also inspired me to read a few novels by the Master himself. Though I remain a bigger fan of his brother William (a maniacal fan, really), The Bostonians and The American were highlights of my year’s reading.

But my favorite read in 2009 happened to be published in 2009: Lydia Peelle’sReasons for and Advantages of Breathing, as confident and well crafted a collection as I’ve read in a long time. Starring semi-rural characters down on their luck in places from Illinois to the outskirts of Nashville, these eight stories contain both humor and compassion about people and an appreciation for nature that is never heavy-handed. In “Phantom Pain,” one of the best stories, residents panic at unconfirmed reports of a wild animal loose in their town — everyone except for Jack Wells, an older taxidermist who thinks he’s been around too long to believe it. Peelle’s prose is never less than assured, and it’s brilliant frequently enough to make this short book both a delight and a promise of things to come.